1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a three-dimensional display device, and in particular, to an autostereoscopic three-dimensional display device using a parallax barrier, and a driving method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
A three-dimensional display device may be categorized as a stereoscopic display device where a user wears viewing aids, such as polarizing glasses, or an autostereoscopic display device where the user can see a desired three-dimensional image without wearing such viewing aids.
A common autostereoscopic display device utilizes an optical separation element, such as a lenticular lens, a parallax barrier, or a microlens array, to spatially separate or isolate the left-eye image part and the right-eye image part displayed at an image display unit in the directions of the left and right eyes of the user, respectively.
In particular, the parallax barrier may be formed with a liquid crystal shutter utilizing a transmission type of liquid crystal display, and in this case, it may be converted between a two-dimensional mode and a three-dimensional mode. Thus the parallax barrier can be applied to laptop computers or cellular phones.
The parallax barrier includes stripe-shaped light interception portions and light transmission portions. The parallax barrier selectively separates left and right eye images displayed at the image display unit through the light transmission portions such that the left and right eye images are respectively provided to the left and right eyes of the user.
Generally, a three-dimensional display device of the parallax barrier type spatially separates the left and right eye images.
However, the resolution of a three-dimensional image produced by such a display device is no more than half as fine as that of two-dimensional images produced by such a display device because the right and left eye images of the latter are provided to the respective eyes of the user.
Recently, display devices that can provide both portrait-type views and landscape-type views by rotating the display device have been developed.
However, conventional parallax barriers are adapted to provide only one of the portrait- or landscape-type views.